Tuberculosis and leprosy, caused by the bacilli from the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex and M. leprae, respectively, are the two major mycobacterial diseases. Other mycobacteriosis caused by a typical mycobacteria such as M. avium, M. xenopi, and M. Kansasii also represent major health problems worldwide.
M. avium is a predominant strain isolated from T.B. patients with AIDS (Horburgh et al., 1991) and M. xenopi along with M. kansasii and M. avium, is the main agent of pulmonary infections due to opportunist mycobacteria in HIV seronegative patients. (M. Picardeau et al., 1995).
In addition, these atypical mycobacteriosis are often difficult to cure because of the lack of efficient drugs specifically directed against atypical mycobacteria. Pathogenic mycobacteria have the ability to survive within host phagocytic cells. The pathology of the tuberculosis infection derives from the interactions between the host and the bacteria, resulting from the damage the host immune response causes on tissues (Andersen & Brennan, 1994). In addition, the protection of the host against mycobacteria infection also depends on interactions between the host and mycobacteria.
Identification of the bacterial antigens involved in these interactions with the immune system is essential for the understanding of the pathogenic mechanisms of mycobacteria and the host immunological response in relation to the evolution of the disease. It is also of great importance for the improvement of the strategies for mycobacterial disease control through vaccination and immunodiagnosis.
Through the years, various strategies have been followed for identifying mycobacterial antigens. Biochemical tools for fractionating and analyzing bacterial proteins permitted the isolation of antigenic proteins selected on their capacity to elicit B- or T-cell responses (Romain et al., 1993; Sorensen et al., 1995). The recent development of molecular genetic methods for mycobacteria (Jacobs et al., 1991; Snapper et al., 1990; Hatful, 1993; Young et al., 1985) allowed the construction of DNA expression libraries of both M. tuberculosis and M. leprae in the λgt11 vector and their expression in E. coli. The screening of these recombinant libraries using murine polyclonal or monoclonal antibodies and patient sera led to the identification of numerous antigens (Braibant et al., 1994; Hermans et al., 1995; Thole & van der Zee, 1990). However, most of them turned out to belong to the group of highly conserved heat shock proteins (Thole & van der Zee, 1990; Young et al., 1990).
The observation in animal models that specific protection against tuberculosis was conferred only by administration of live BCG vaccine, suggested that mycobacterial secreted proteins might play a major role in inducing protective immunity. These proteins were shown to induce cell-mediated immune responses and protective immunity in a guinea pig or a mouse model of tuberculosis (Pal & Horwitz, 1992; Andersen, 1994; Haslov et al., 1995). Recently, a genetic methodology for the identification of exported proteins based on PhoA gene fusions was adapted to mycobacteria by (Lim et al., 1995). It permitted the isolation of M. tuberculosis DNA fragments encoding exported proteins, including the already known 19 kDa lipoprotein (Lee et al., 1992) and the ERP protein similar to the M. leprae 28 kDa antigen (Berthet et al., 1995).